NEWS RELEASES

Participants at informal wake recall struggles
and glories of nine-year run

YOU'RE
STILL THE ONE — By supercomputer standards, Sandia’s
ASCI Red, the world’s first teraflop machine, was ancient,
but what a run it had! Here, designer Jim Tomkins (left)
talks abuot ASCI Red and its accomplishments with Intel officials
Justin Rattner and Stephen Wheat. Rob Leland looks on at
right. (Photos
by Paul Edward Sanchez)Download
300dpi JPEG image, “ascired-designer.jpg,” 412K
(Media are welcome to download/publish this image with
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news stories.)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — On a table in a small meeting
room at Sandia National Laboratories rested a picture of
the deceased — a row of identical cabinets that formed
part of the entity known as ASCI Red, the world’s
first teraflop supercomputer.

Still one of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers
after all these years — nine — ASCI Red was being decommissioned.

“I’ve never buried a computer before,” said
Justin Rattner, Intel Chief Technology Officer, to 30 people
from Sandia and the Intel Corp. who gathered in mid-June
to pay their respects. “We should go around the room
so everyone can say their final farewells.”

On a nearby table sat a simple white frosted cake. Encircled
top and bottom by two strings of small simulated pearls
and topped by pink flowers and a silver ribbon, it resembled
a hat that could be worn by a very elderly lady, and indeed,
ASCI Red was very old by supercomputer standards.

Sandia vice-president Rick Stulen eulogized, “ASCI
Red broke all records and most importantly ushered the
world into the teraflop regime. It still holds the record
for the longest continuous rating as the world’s
fastest computer, four years running.”

A teraflop represents a trillion mathematical operations
per second.

Sandia is a National
Nuclear Security Administration laboratory.

VP
RICK STULEN and Intel designer Stephen Wheat look at the
innards of an ASCI Red rack. The machine’s easy accessibility
made it possible to upgrade the processors, assuring it would
remain one of the world’s fastest computers for nearly a
decade.Download
300dpi JPEG image, “ascired-stulen-wheat.jpg,” 412K
(Media are welcome to download/publish this image with
related
news stories.)

ASCI Red was a critical part of NNSA’s Advanced
Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. The computer
simulation capabilities developed by the ASC program, and
conducted on supercomputers like ASCI Red, provide the
nuclear weapons and materials analysis that NNSA needs
to keep the nuclear weapons stockpile safe, secure and
reliable without underground nuclear testing.

ASCI Red first broke the teraflops barrier in December,
1996 and topped the world-recognized LINPAC top-500 computer
speed ratings seven consecutive times from June 1997 to
June 2000.

Originally rated at 1.6 teraflops, a chip upgrade raised
it to 3.1 t-flops just when it looked as though its world
supremacy would be lost.

It remains, nine years after it was first turned on, still
one of the 500 fastest computers in the world.

Sandia director Bill Camp said that ASCI Red had the best
reliability of any supercomputer ever built, and “was
supercomputing’s high-water mark in longevity, price,
and performance.”

“It was almost mystical in scalability,” said
another Sandia director, Rob Leland. “All these
other machines would be tailing off and Red would still
be cruising along,”

Said Rattner, “There’s a sense of sadness
and also of satisfaction: the passing of such a great
machine and the incredible affection so many of you show
for this inanimate object that occupies this floor space.”

Rattner gave some insight into the general feeling about
what was, after all, only a machine when he spoke about
his own emotions when ASCI Red proved successful. “I
remember, shortly after the teraflops barrier was broken,” he
told the assembled mourners, “I would say to myself
as I drove by in my car: the world’s fastest computer
is sitting in that nondescript building [in Beaverton,
Oregon, before it was moved to Sandia]. It gave me
tremendous satisfaction. When Chuck Yeager cracked the
sound barrier or Armstrong landed on the moon, I wonder
if they had the same feeling. It is with great fondness
that we say goodbye to ASCI Red. It’s been a great
run and we’ll never forget it.”

Stephen Wheat, a former Sandian who went over to Intel
to help design the computer, said that the chip was a third-generation
chip, and so the design was accomplished in only three
months with great reliability. After that, Intel
got out of the supercomputer business so as not to compete
with customers who might want to enter.

“An indication of how good the reliability was,” said
Sandia computer designer Jim Tomkins, “was that the
hardware reliability remained the same when Sandia took
it over from Intel.”

The idea for the machine in the first place, as well as
the programs that ran the computer near-flawlessly, were
developed by Sandia over nearly a decade of leadership
in multiple parallel-processing machines — individual
computer processors programmed to act in concert with each
other.

“When we first talked about running a machine
with 10,000 processors, it seemed ludicrous,” Rattner
said, apparently anticipating massive downtimes. But
instead of 27 hours average time between hardware-caused
interrupts — the figure predicted in the design phase —
Red achieved an average of several hundreds hours.

Sandia researcher Michael Hannah,till 2002 charged with
keeping the machine running, emphasized that the machine
was not being decommissioned because of technical problems. “It’s
not a reliability issue, because ASCI Red is still reliable,” he
said. “It is about getting more bang for the buck
with nine-year-newer technology and terminating significant
costs in space, power, and cooling.”

Jammed into the same small air-cooled building were other
supercomputers, including Sandia’s Thunderbird capacity
supercomputer, running at approximately 60 teraflops. In
a new building, next door was Red Storm, clipping along
at roughly 40 t-flops.

“Having so many machines in so little space keeps
us innovative,” says Sandia manager Archie Gibson.

Sandia is a multiprogram laboratory operated
by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the
U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security
Administration. Sandia has major R&D responsibilities
in national security, energy and environmental technologies,
and economic competitiveness.